Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  One evening, Ni Yixian noticed Xiao Liu, one of his new army friends, crying over a letter he had just received...

  ‘My whole family has starved to death,’ his friend replied simply. Xiao Liu was from Anhui... Soon Yixian began to notice other of his fellow soldiers weeping when they received letters from home. He began questioning his comrades. Their stories were always the same. The families of the soldiers were starving. Many were from Anhui...

  In 1962, Ni Yuxian, then aged 16, took two weeks to write a letter of thirty pages to Mao in which he described the terrible famine, the underlying reasons and his remedy – private farming. He showed the letter to three friends and one night in the barracks they lay under a blanket and discussed it. Only one, Yang Guoli, was in favour of sending the letter to Mao: ‘I know it’s dangerous,’ his friend argued, ‘but we have to be responsible to the peasants. If you don’t take responsibility, who will? If Chairman Mao really does read the letter, if he knows the true situation, then the results just have to be good. The policies will change...’3

  The letter marked the start of Ni Yuxian’s life as a dissident. The same is true of other major figures in the dissident movement such as Wei Jingsheng, the outspoken figure imprisoned during the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, who became one of China’s most famous political prisoners. In his writings, he describes his horror at the poverty he witnessed as a Red Guard travelling through the countryside:

  Eventually I went to my rural ancestral village in Anhui province. During my stay in the village, the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward was deeply impressed on my mind. Whenever the peasants talked of the Great Leap days, it was as though they were reliving ‘doomsday’ and could hardly hide their feelings of having been lucky enough to survive. Gradually, I came to understand that the so-called ‘three years of natural disasters’ were not really natural in origin, but caused by erroneous policies. Peasants recalled, for example, that during the Communising Wind in 1959-60, rice was left to rot in the fields because the peasants were too weakened [by hunger] to harvest.

  During a gathering at a friend’s house in the neighbouring village, I heard horror stories of villagers who had exchanged babies to eat. I pitied them all. Who had made these parents live to taste, inconceivably, of human flesh mixed with parental tears? By this time, I was able to discern clearly the face of the executioner, whose like would only come along ‘once in several centuries in the whole world and once in several millennia in China’ – and his name was Mao Zedong. It was Mao Zedong’s criminal systems and policies that had made these parents, driven out of their reason by starvation, commit such acts to survive.4

  Like others, Wei Jingsheng learned about the famine because, under Mao’s instructions, peasants were urged to ‘speak bitterness’ in village meetings, in other words to remind their listeners of how hard life had been before 1949. Local Party committees were also ordered to compile written histories based on these memories. Many Red Guards were amused by this, as one recalled: ‘When in the Cultural Revolution we attended meetings in villages, the peasants were asked to speak of their hardships under the old regime but they always talked of 1960. The cadres always became furious because they did not speak of the years before 1949.’5

  For some Red Guards this was the first they had heard of the famine and such tales helped puncture their illusions about Mao. Even the better informed students were shocked to hear just how bad the famine had been. The peasants had fewer illusions. Fatalistic, ignorant of what had happened outside their own village and resigned to bad government, they were careful to keep their thoughts to themselves. Yet their faith in Mao was not necessarily shaken by the famine. One former Red Guard who lived in a poor village in Anhui said that ‘The villagers didn’t blame Mao. They said: “Buddha’s doctrine is right but the monks read the scriptures with a wicked mouth.”‘6 For much of the Mao era, village loudspeakers blared out propaganda about endless successes in the rest of the countryside, and the official propaganda line swung erratically from one extreme to another, indifferent to logic or consistency. At the start of the Great Leap Forward, the People’s Daily declared that ‘Today, in the era of Mao Zedong, Heaven is here on earth.’ Two years later the same paper instructed readers to behave ‘as if the times of abundance were the times of shortage’.

  Having told the Chinese that the Communist system had ‘conquered nature’ and that ‘natural calamities’ were now a thing of the past, the Party then blamed the famine on natural calamities. People were told that the country had suffered the worst natural disaster ‘for a hundred years’; that unlike any other natural disaster in history, this disaster of droughts, floods, hurricanes, plagues and pests had affected every corner of China; and that this had happened for three consecutive years.

  It is doubtful whether anyone in the villages or in the cities really believed this nonsense but fear ensured that no one dared point out such contradictions and fallacies. One interviewee, who was a student in Beijing at the time, recalled that ‘If you said anything, you might be called a counterrevolutionary and put in prison. There were lots of rumours about the failure of the communes but it was impossible to call the people’s communes into question. I made myself not question anything. I thought it was better not to think at all.’

  In 1960, the official line changed again. The thousands of Soviet experts scattered around the country suddenly packed their bags. Within two weeks they had all gone and now the shortages were blamed on the Russians. In Beijing University, students were informed that ‘The official reason for the shortages was that China had borrowed a lot from the Soviet Union. Now because of the ideological difference we had to pay back these debts.’7 In Shenyang, Liaoning province, schoolchildren were told the same thing:

  One day in the bleakest midwinter, a school assembly was held. Principal Gao, thinner and less effervescent than he had been, stood up and denounced the Soviet Union. ‘Our one time “elder brother” has betrayed us,’ he told us. ‘Khrushchev the Revisionist has summoned home all the Soviet engineers and technicians who were in our country helping with socialist construction. He has torn up all the agreements calling for scientific and technical co-operation. He has called in all the loans that the Soviet Union had made to China.’8

  Others were told that China had only borrowed these funds to fight the Korean War. The loans allegedly had to be repaid with food. Stories were circulated about how fussy the Soviets were, accepting only apples of a certain diameter. What really happened was quite the reverse. From 1958, China exported millions of tonnes of grain to the Soviet Union to demonstrate to the sceptical Khrushchev the success of Mao’s Great Leap into Communism; and, convinced by her own propaganda, she also stepped up her exports of food and textiles to Hong Kong and many other countries and increased her aid to various allies such as Albania.

  The Party also appealed to national pride. Children were told that ‘Chairman Mao has said we must pay back our debts. China must not be a debtor nation. This is a matter of national pride. We must scrimp and save, until the loans are repaid. That is why we have no fruit, vegetables, or grain. They are being sold to raise money. The recklessness of the Soviet Union is responsible for our food shortage.’9

  More or less the same stories were circulated in labour camps and in the villages. Party officials who debriefed doctors returning from Gansu’s famine regions made false patriotism the cornerstone of their appeal. A Party leader told the medical team that

  The purpose of our meeting today is to improve and unify our thoughts. At present the imperialist and revisionist Soviet Union is taking advantage of our difficulties and forcing us to repay our debts. They are pressing us, the people, to oppose the Party and our Great Leader. They are saying that there are people starving to death. Haven’t you got dignity? Do we help those imperialists and admit people died of hunger? Do we have our national pride? Do we want to disgrace our Party and Great Leader?10

  In 1962, the Party also launched a great wave of propaganda to mak
e an ordinary soldier, Lei Feng, who died when a telegraph pole fell on him, the model for the entire nation. His dearest wish was to be ‘a rustless cog in the great machinery of socialism’ and his most heroic attribute was a mindless, unquestioning obedience.

  Five years later, the propaganda machine performed its most astonishing somersault. With the Cultural Revolution in full swing, Liu Shaoqi was blamed for the famine:

  A statement published in 1971 exonerated Mao from all responsibility for the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi was attacked for promoting excessive radicalism to sabotage Mao’s policies in 1958 by urging the hasty nationalization of the communes and the abolition of wages based on the individual’s work performance... in other words the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the initial defects of the communes were laid at Liu’s door while Mao was depicted as the moderate.11

  The official attitude to the truth changed greatly after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping set about overturning collective agriculture. For a brief period, sometimes called the Democracy Wall movement after a place in Beijing where free speech and wall posters were tolerated, people dared to break many taboos. They attacked the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution and, though direct criticism of Mao was still forbidden, writers were encouraged to expose the madness of the Great Leap Forward. In Henan, Y Xu, the author of the opera Catastrophe of Lies mentioned earlier, was given access to internal Party documents. The work was performed and received praise from Deng’s lieutenant, Hu Yaobang. Such openness, when the boundaries of what was permissible were undefined, ended in 1981 when the Party drew up its verdict on Mao’s rule. The Democracy Wall was closed, Catastrophe of Lies was no longer performed, dissenting voices were silenced by harsh jail sentences and all discussion of the Great Leap Forward ceased. In the Party’s official resolution on history, Mao was judged to have been 70 per cent correct. The Great Leap Forward was not considered part of the 30 per cent which constituted his mistakes. Instead, the Party declared that ‘It was mainly due to the errors of the “Great Leap Forward” and of the struggle against “right opportunism” together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961, which caused serious losses to our country and people.’12

  Despite the slogan ‘Seek truth from facts’, the Party issued clear instructions to all concerned on how to handle the past in such internal publications as How to Record the Annals of a Place.13 This particular Orwellian manual, edited by Zheng Zhengxi and published in December 1989, forms part of a series of handbooks for cadres to use when writing the history of their county or work unit. Its instructions apply equally to those supervising histories, plays, novels and films since they must all reflect Party policy. The book is particularly interesting because it recommends a shift in the rewriting of history: ‘Some histories still use the old term “three years of natural disasters” as an explanation of the cause of the disaster but we should now make it clear that it was caused by human error. We should not leave people with the impression that judgment has been suspended.’

  Indeed, most officials have now stopped pretending that the food shortages were caused by a continual series of disasters. In interviews with the author, senior officials dismissed the notion with a chuckle as if to say, who could be so gullible as to believe such a tall story? In keeping with this change, data on droughts and floods compiled and published by the national meteorological office now show that there was no abnormal weather between 1958 and 1962. Compared to most other years during Mao’s rule, there were fewer natural disasters during the famine. In 1960, less than a third of the country’s 120 meteorological stations recorded a drought. Of these only eight places posted a severe drought. These official figures were also corroborated by all those interviewed.

  In How to Record the Annals of a Place, historians are told to treat the Great Leap Forward as an economic, not a political error. This means that the very phrase ‘Great Leap Forward’ must be written between inverted commas in order to make it clear that there was no increase in production. Those who have done otherwise (the author cites the compilers of histories in Nanjing and Wuxi) are urged to change their texts to delete the earlier view that the Leap brought economic benefits: ‘We must start with the fundamental assumption that the “Great Leap Forward” was a bad thing... We should record what happened in the perspective of the whole situation, to show that people blindly launched new projects. Although some were successful, it must be clear that in its entirety it was a failure.’

  Such successes as there were must be shown to be the consequence of people rejecting, not following, the methods of the Leap. The author urges other historians to demolish the myth that production rose steeply and, above all, he says historians must differentiate between ‘blind fervour’ and ‘revolutionary spirit’. They should reveal the connection between the anti-right opportunist movement, leftist mistakes and the disasters of the Leap.

  The book is particularly interesting when it speaks of the differences between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. While the Great Leap Forward is a forgivable mistake ‘in the Chinese people’s pursuit of the road of socialist construction led by the Communist Party’, the Cultural Revolution must be treated as ‘a severe and disastrous event wrongly launched by leaders and manipulated by a counterrevolutionary group’. It points out, too, that the Cultural Revolution lasted for ten years but the Great Leap Forward only lasted for three, so in terms of damage inflicted the Cultural Revolution was by far the greater catastrophe: ‘The “Great Leap Forward” damaged economic life but the Cultural Revolution began in the ideological field so everything was affected.’

  Given this emphasis the book talks of the famine chiefly in terms of damage to the Party, so that it is ‘only an error in the process of socialist construction of our economy which was solved by readjustment’. In the Cultural Revolution, but not the famine, Party member was set against Party member in an internal war. So the book goes on to spell out how the Great Leap Forward must be recorded so as to put the Party in a good light. The author puts forward an example from his own compilation of the history of Guizhou: ‘Even before the Spring Festival there was a food shortage and only enough stored food to last two months. So I recorded what the county Party committee did in a very positive light. I said, for example, that they started an “anti-grain-hiding campaign”.’ In reality, it was precisely this forcible seizure of grain that caused so many deaths. The moral dimension of what the Party did in creating an artificial famine is entirely avoided by omitting any mention of the price paid in human lives. This absence of any reference to the toll of human misery is in keeping with the general practice in Chinese reporting. While economic losses are always carefully calculated when reporting disasters, similar care is never taken in counting lives lost.

  Finally, the book makes it clear that it is still taboo to talk of a famine. This means that official accounts of recent Chinese history still cannot be relied upon. Indeed the degree to which the Party remains in firm control of the past inside China is astonishing, particularly since this also requires the complicity of overseas Chinese, few of whom have been willing to speak out, either from a distorted sense of patriotism, or to protect relatives. Nevertheless, accounts of the period are emerging both within and outside China. One thinly disguised record of the famine was published in China in 1994.14 Hungry Mountain Village tells the story of a Beijing journalist who is labelled as a rightist and then sent to live in a village in the north-west. In this bitter and angry account, no horrors are spared. The local Party officials are portrayed in a particularly harsh light. The village Secretary is an ex-army man who feeds himself and the rest of his family as others starve to death, and exploits his power to force women to sleep with him. Before the spring sowing, he dips the seeds in poison to prevent children eating them and many die as a result. The peasants, too, behave like savages, chopping the bodies of children
into meat which they eat. Although this is hardly flattering to the Party, the book avoids all mention of Mao himself. Even for this author, the Great Leader remains beyond explicit criticism.

  These official and semi-official restrictions have not blunted the readiness of peasants to talk privately, without inhibitions, about the past. They are well aware of Mao’s role, yet they share a genuine reluctance to condemn him. Conversations with peasants follow a circuitous pattern: Mao cannot be entirely blamed because he was deceived by false reports sent by ambitious officials. As always in China, the Emperor is never wrong, only misled by his ministers who flatter him and who in turn are deceived by dishonest lower-ranking officials. On the other hand, they cannot be blamed either, because they have no choice but to follow orders from above. So in the end no one is responsible.

  Indeed, hardly anyone was ever punished for the famine. Lower-ranking officials who were initially arrested were often released on Mao’s orders. Those condemned as right opportunists were rarely fully rehabilitated after 1979, apart from key figures such as Peng Dehuai who were already dead. The peasants, who lost all their possessions, were generally not compensated. No monuments commemorate the victims and some Chinese are still not willing to believe that a famine costing so many lives ever took place.

  Yet the famine does have a ghostly existence in the collective consciousness of the Chinese. Events in the period are projected back into the pre-1949 past. Films such as the award-winning Yellow Earth about the life of drought-stricken peasants in the loess plateau of Shaanxi contain subtle references. Most tellingly of all, when the pro-democracy demonstrators took over Tiananmen Square in 1989, they chose to show their contempt for the Party and to rally support by going on hunger strike. This form of protest is not common in Chinese politics and many Beijing citizens expressed their sympathy by bringing food to the hunger-strikers. Amongst rural Chinese, this symbolic gesture must have tapped a deep well of feeling. How could anyone willingly allow themselves to starve? The effect on the conscience of leaders such as Zhao Ziyang or Deng Xiaoping, men who were so intimately involved with the famine, can only be imagined.